If Trump was a mythical creature he'd be a hydra. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

This. with a few changes, is a republication of a Substack I wrote on May 17th. I was prompted to write it after I read “'I want the answer, and I want it now': Trump launches baffling attack at drug companies.” in RawStory.

The two posts below should constitute enough proof that Donald Trump is a mentally unwell rageaholic. The first could stand alone. It is a response to highly critical things Bruce Springsteen said about him on his overseas concert tour. The second comes out of the recesses of Trump’s fevered mind. Taylor Swift hasn’t been in the news saying anthing critical of Trump. She merely exists as a hotter than hot superstar and Trump can’t stand this. Therefore, why not follow-up an attack on The Boss with an attack on Swift. She could be called The Boss if Springsteen already hadn’t earned that name.

Attacking Taylor Swift doesn’t make sense. That is, it doesn’t make sense unless you’re Donald Trump.

It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d have thrown in an attack against Joe Biden just for good measure.

Amend that…

I just checked Truth Social. He did at 5:34 this morning:

Then this morning we have these stories which provide further justification for my “diagnosis” of Trump as an unwell rageaholic.

Trump rampages after 'bad and dangerous day'

and

'Historically criminal event': Trump rants about 'bigger scandal' in early morning blow-up

Most people know what a rageaholic is. This is as good a defintion as any (from Psych Central):

Rageaholic definition

“Rageaholic“ isn’t a diagnosis recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5).

This doesn’t mean rageaholic symptoms aren’t real, or that the uncontrollable flashes of anger you experience aren’t significant.

Rageaholism does exist. It’s been written about and explored in research Trusted Source, and it’s an informal term used to describe someone who seems unable to control their temper.

Often, a rageaholic will display unprovoked bouts of rage or a level of anger excessive for the given situation.

Trump’s rage attacks are part and parcel of his narcissistic personality disorder, that is, his exaggerated feelings of self-importance, excessive need for admiration, and a diminished ability to empathize with other people's feelings.

Trump postures as a strutting peacock who delights in showing off his feathers.

In reality under the pretense of supreme self-confidence are deeply buried feelings of inferiority. Therapists have written about this but none with the inside knowledge of his niece Mary Trump who diagnoses him as having a narcissstic personality disorder (read “A Provocative Psychological Analysis of Trump by a Trump”)

There is a phenomena which occurs with extreme narcissists called narcissistic injury (see Wikipedia). We see aspects of this with Trump but he never actually experiences the hurts of the injury. Consider this from Wikipedia:

A narcissistic injury will oftentimes not be noticeable by the subject at first sight. Narcissistic injuries, or narcissistic wounds, are likely a result of criticism, loss, or even a sense of abandonment. Those diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder will come off as excessively defensive and attacking when facing any sort of criticism. While the average person would likely react by expressing vulnerability, a person dealing with a narcissistic wound will do the opposite, causing them to come off as narcissistic, despite feeling hurt inside. The reaction of a narcissistic injury is a cover-up for the real feelings of one who faces these problems

Trump doesn’t come off as defensive when criticized because he instantly goes into attack mode. He does not experience an assault on his self-esteem even for a conscious nano-second.

I wrote the above back in May. Between then and now, in addition to what was reported in RawStory today, we have numerous other examples of how volatile Trump is, how he flies off the handle irrationally, how he doesn’t think things through befoe going into attack mode.

If you look up “Trump regeholic” on DuckDuckGo this is what you see: 

At least one of my essays in on the list.

You can also do a Google search here.

Obviously this assessment is not original with me. It just needs to be said again and again. Hopefully it will sink in that whether or not Trump is physically falling apart or not, mentally he manifests so many pathologies and aberrations that if he were a mythical creature he’d be a hydra.

Addendum:

I’ve written many essays since 2017 about Trump’s psychopathology. There are so many I added them up in March and came up with four major ones. That why I wrote Sadists ® U.S: Trump and The Dark Tetrad. (It should be obvious that Trump is an example of someone who has all of the traits of The Dark Tetrad: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.) Then in April I added a fifth and wrote “Trump is in the Dark Pentagon, and I don't mean the home of the Dept. of Defense.”

I suppose the next geometric shape I can write about is a hexagon if I wanted to add rageaholic. This is approriate because each of Trump’s psychopathologies are different with some worse and more dangerous than others, since hexagons can be regular, with all sides and angles equal, or irregular, with sides and angles of different lengths and measures. 

There’s an alliteration in this. 

Since one never can tell what fresh horror Trump will emerge from his gaping maw there may be no end to the geometric shapes I could use to describe him;

Check back later. I have things to do and people to see this Labor Day, but I may find something to comment on.

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The trans communtiy needs their own Billy Jean King, by Hal M. Brown

 

I just watched this guy, Sebastion Gorka shown below, this lying trans obsessed sack of excrement, on CNN blaming trans youth for an inordinate number of school shootings:

When the host tried to interrupt him disputing his claims with real statistics he kept talking over him. This was yet another time I wished hosts could a flash yellow light before cutting off their microphone. 

Whenever the host tried to interject actual factual statistics he accused CNN of making up their own facts and having done this for 10 years.

In the next segement, which was supposed to be about RFK Jr., another Trump spokesmans went off once again on how trans people need to be dealt with. This had absolutely nothing to do with what everyone else was discussing on a panel what included him, a less adamant RFK Jr. supporter, and, if I recall correctly, one or two critics.

I am not going to go into depth about this particular show and specifically Sebastion Gorka. It should suffice to show his X page (below):

What I am both intrigued and disgusted by is how anti-trans has even become a “thing.” As both a retired psychotherapist and I hope a rational person it seems that this should be a non-issue. The only time the word “problem” should be in the same sentence as “trans people” is when addressing the problem of the lack of mental health services for providing support for this group. Not only this population, but for any other underserved vulnerable group for whom expert, which would mean non-judgmental, counseling would be beneficial. 

When I was on a diversity committee about 25 years ago, along with school administrators and counselors, pastors, and other therapists, it was to help address what was then a growing recognition of the problems gay, lesbian, and bisexual students were having coping with their emotions and to find ways to help them deal with prejudice and basically, to put it simplisitically, to feel good about themselves and their future. We didn’t even talk about trans. 

I’m not even sure that I and others knew that, as current estimates show, 3.3% of high school students identify as transgender. The term gay at the time encompassed lesbian, hence they was a “gay and straight” alliance group in our high school. AI tells me that “The term LGBTQ began to be used in the early 2000s, evolving from the earlier acronym LGBT, which was adopted in the 1990s. The initialism itself originated from LGB, which was first used in the mid-1980s.” 

There was no LGBTQ+ alphabet with a long list of acronyms like those listed and described on this 2021 website and others.

Political expediency has manadated that people who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual must only be mocked in private and that they may never be publicly demonized. There are just too many of them in the population that hold high postions in politics, business, the arts and entertainment.

There are gay and lesbian people working in the White House, notable among them Scott Bessent, Secretary of Treasury and Ric Grennell, the presidential envoy for special missions, but there are several more (see article).

Trump can play YMCA at his rallies and nobody blinks a bigoted eyelash, but citing financial constraints and scheduling conflicts, he canceled The Gay Men’s Chorus at The Kennedy Center Pride perfomance (see article) I am quite certain it was really because of one capital letter in this sentence:

Aside from believers in the Pray the Gay Away movement my sense is that many, perhaps the majority, of people accept that people are born with certain gender preferences or proclivities. The idea that one could become gay or lesbian due to some kind of overprotective mothering or, as Freud thought, a developmental arrest in early childhood, has been abandoned by experts in psychology and sexology.

While it SHOULD be abundantly clear to a thinking person that the same holds true for a trans person who knows from an early age that the gender of the body they were born with is not the gender that they really are.

The exact causes of being transgender are not fully understood. Current research suggests a combination of genetic, brain structure, and hormonal factors play a role. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think childhood experiences play a role as the anti-trans people want you to believe.

But what a wowza way to demonize a group for political gain than to decide trans people are just plain bad and shouldn’t exist. 

The anti-trans GOP don’t rage about people like tennis great Billie Jean King who is a prominent LGBTQ rights advocate. She publicly came out as a lesbian in 1981 after being outed.

I well remember when she played a well known male tennis player, Bobby Riggs, in the much hyped Battle of the Sexes (see Wikipedia).

But had she been someone born a man who became a woman, you damn well know the anti-trans movement among Republicans would have gained traction back in the eighties.

OUT Magazine recently listed 33 football players who came out as gay (here).

Nobody is raising hell saying they shouldn’t be allowed to play.

Just wait until we have one accomplished male to female trans athelete competing in and being a standout in a very popular woman’s sport and we’ll have to see what the anti-trans group has to say. So far all I have found is a list of 29 trans athletes who have won state, national or international titles in women’s sports. I have not heard of a single one of them. If you look down the list you will see the sporting events are not what you would call “major sports.” It is only a matter of time before someone emerges in a professional sport that large numbers of people pay attention to.

Then we may have a trans Billy Jean King. I hope it happens in my lifetime. I want to see a spokeswoman like King go up against the anti-trans bigots.

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Who among the Trump toadies believes the shite they spout in praise of Dear Leader? Really, if they're in their right minds, who among the people we see surrounding Trump just about every day believes he is as great as he says he is?

 

Substack (here) is the best place to read this. It is where I post updates.

Two things struck me watching the news last night. One was a video of the Trump Cabinet meeting a few days where Steve Witkoff, United States Special Envoy to the Middle East, pitched Trump as the “single finest candidate” ever for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Watch the 30 most embarrassing 30 seconds ever to come from the White House here.

Trump and everyone in the room wants us to belieive he deserves the honor awarded to people who have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

One might wonder what Nobel would have thought about the army Turmp has been building under the guise of fighting crime and illegal immigration. He also might wonder about Trump trying to run roughshod over the fraternity between free nations by cozying up to authoritarian counties.

Witkoff made his Nobel Peace Prize statement with a straight face. There was no hint of irony. Nobody in the room showed any indication of cracking a smile, let alone falling on the floor beset with a sudden attack of the giggles.

I wonder how a Cabinet room full of people not beholden to Trump who also were sane would have reacted to the Nobel Peace Prize shite. Probably like shown below:

Then there was the clip of Stephen Miller praising RJK Jr. See 'Crazy': Trump aide Stephen Miller buried in mockery after wild claim about RFK Jr.

Last night in an update to my Substack I wrote:

If you think Epstein and Ukraine are the stories Trump, if he’s got a semblance of sensibility, ought to be fitfully fretting about in the wee hours of the morning it has to be what he’s going to do with RFK Jr. How can he, the man who’s never wrong and has never admitted he was wrong admit he was wrong about Kennedy? All I can come up with is something to do with Trump claming that nobody told him how bad having brain worms were.

I added these illustrations:

These are merely two examples of how Trump has surrounded himself with toadies.

If only these were real amphibians. At least most toads play an important beneficial role in the ecosystem (read article). They are more like the exception, cane toads which have toxic skins and a voracious appetites. They are now considered a pest and an invasive species in many of its introduced regions. You can chose your synonym for these human toadies (click below to enlarge): 

Here’s the question I pose to you:

Shit or shite, we say it the the first way and the Brits say it the second. Either way you say it, in reality what we see before us on a daily basis is an exaggerated version of the only dirty joke my father ever told me. 

He told it as if it really happened to him when he was in the Army. He set it up by explaining how the mess hall cook was not someone to trifle with because, as a master sergeant, he could order troops to do the most boring repetitious KP like peeling potatoes for weeks at a time. 

I knew about KP because I’d read Beetle Bailey comics.

Cookie (Cornelius) Jowls, was known for his questionable cooking and his lack of sanitary food preparation measures. He expected his soldiers to show that they thought his cooking was always fantastic and for them to praise every meal effusively.

In my father’s story one day the mess sergeant became suspicious that his soldiers were faking their compliments so he baked cakes, and instead of his usual chocolate icing from a can, he got his icing from another can, also known as the latrine.

When desert came, the soldiers could immediately smell what was what, but they knew they had to eat the cake. Each and every one of them did their best not to throw up and managed to swallow a few forkfuls. Then the only brave soldier in the group summoned the courage to exclaim “master sergeant, this cake tastes like shit!” 

It was like everyone in the mess hall held their breath for what seemed like an eternity, but it was only seconds before this brave soul succumbed and said…

…. check back on Substack later to see what news I have comments about.

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